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I know you say in the comments that this is still in progress, but it would be really helpful if you had a conclusions section that ties the results together. F

I know you say in the comments that this is still in progress, but it would be really helpful if you had a conclusions section that ties the results together. From your HN headline, I see that you conclude that the evidence points to DNB being ineffective for improving general intelligence, but that was not the sense I got from actually reading the analysis; rather, I had the sense that evidence supports an improvement in intelligence, but that this evidence is much weaker than it appears to be at first glance. So it would be helpful if you had some explanation of your final conclusion.

gwern 13y ago
My own basic conclusion is included in the first section, the bits starting with "The confidence interval excludes zero, so one might conclude that n-back does increase IQ scores. From a Bayesian standpoint, it's worth pointing out that this is not nearly as conclusive as it seems, for two reasons:..." As it happens, the active-control-group studies seem to be converging on zero, so I don't even have to appeal to priors. But if the result had been to find, say, d=0.4, I still wouldn't believe it: it would be more likely that the IQ tests are being corrupted, or publication bias had caused this, or fraud was involved, than we would have found a simple WM exercise which genuinely increased IQ after countless failures. I do, of course, want to finish up the details (correct the Clouter data, and include the Seidler et al 2010 and Colom et al 2013 data) before I write up any kind of definitive conclusion & do a post-mortem of dual n-back.